


What Makes Us Human

by ljunattainable



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash, mention of hunting as a sport (supernatural creatures), tfwbigbang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:38:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2781776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ljunattainable/pseuds/ljunattainable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas is as good as human in Dean's book, but obviously that's not enough. When Cas goes off hunting on his own after an uncomfortable discussion with Dean, he disappears. Sam and Dean find him in a world where being human or not is the difference between life and death. It turns out there's one key thing that makes us human that Dean never expected Cas to be able to deliver on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Makes Us Human

**Author's Note:**

> This was done for the TFW Big Bang on tumblr  and livejournal  (though I only managed 17.5K words so it's a kind of midi-bang).
> 
> truthismusic did the awesome artwork, which you can find on her livejournal account. [NB. Art contains a spoiler]

Dean slams his pencil down on to the wooden table then glares at it as if it’s done something heinous, which of course it hasn’t because it’s just a damn pencil. He gives up any pretense of reading the book in front of him and nudges the writing end of the pencil with a finger so that it lines up exactly parallel to the edge of the book. Sighing heavily, he lifts his head to stare at one empty wall, while his mind’s eye fills in the blanks with unwelcome images.

“I’m worried,” he says eventually, not shouting exactly but certainly loud enough that Sam will hear through the open gap into the larger room just next door. In truth Dean’s been worried for nigh on three days now but this is the first time he’s voiced his concern aloud.

The clacking of Sam’s fingers on the laptop’s keyboard stops abruptly. It’s almost as if he’d been waiting for Dean to speak. 

“Cas?” Sam’s disembodied voice asks after a couple of seconds has passed. There’s a screeching noise of a chair being scraped across a bare stone floor, and the sound of huge feet in equally huge boots clumping across the same floor, softening briefly when it hits carpet, then Sam appears in the gap that divides the rooms, drawing to a halt, not entering the room fully.

“It’s been a few days since he checked in,” Dean says.

“He’s been pretty good at keeping in touch,” Sam acknowledges, walking into the room proper and dropping into a chair opposite Dean. He draws his eyebrows together and frowns at the table, clearly also concerned. Sam strokes a finger along the smooth wood of the table edge. He flicks his eyes briefly up to Dean, peering around a stray bit of fringe. “Where was he last? What was he doing?”

“He had something over in Greeley. He didn’t say what.” Dean pauses, picks up his pencil and taps it, eraser end down, on the table. Then he huffs and throws the pencil back down on to the table with a clatter. “Get packed. We’re going to Greeley.”

***

Greeley is twelve hours away, give or take. Back in the ‘good old days’ that’d be nothing but now they’re settling down, kind of, and getting old, kind of, twelve hours sitting in an old car is hard on the joints. They stop twice to stretch their legs and empty their bladders and once for Dean to grab a burger and Sam to grab a salad. Dean gave up ribbing Sam about his salads a long time ago but even if he hadn’t, he’s not sure he’d find it in him to do right now. Dean shuffles in his seat to ease the sore spots in his butt.

Cas is human, or as good as in Dean’s opinion. He lives with them, eighty, ninety percent of the time. He eats and sleeps when he absolutely has to; he bleeds, and takes an almost human length of time to heal; he has nightmares and when he does, his screams are loud enough to wake the dead. Not literally, thank God. Not that God gives a damn.

When the angels went back to Heaven, Cas stayed behind with Dean and with Sam. He said it was his choice, but even though Cas got his own grace back from Metatron, there was almost nothing of it left, and although they don’t talk about it, they all know that what is left is fading and one day it will be gone.

Each time when something happens that shows how Cas’s grace has withered just a little bit more, how Cas is becoming just a little more human, Dean asks Cas if he’s made the right choice by staying. Each time he dreads the answer might be no. But Cas always says yes. And then he invariably leaves for a few days, usually to play at hunter somewhere, as if the whole topic is awkward as hell. The last such awkward non-conversation was just over a week ago, and predictably Cas up and left later the same day, avoiding eye contact with Sam and Dean, and hefting his duffel and weapons into the boot of the old wreck on wheels he calls a car before driving off without looking back at where Dean stood in the shadows watching him go.

Dean sighs quietly to himself. Staring out of the windshield he sees more of what’s in his imagination than he does of the road. He thought he was good at avoiding awkward conversations that might possibly stray into feelings he’d rather not discuss, but he’s got nothing on Cas. Dean’s decided that maybe Cas isn’t quite human enough to handle whatever it is that he feels at those moments, perhaps doesn’t even understand it. Dean doesn’t hold out a lot of hope that Dean’s own deeper feelings for Cas will ever be reciprocated.

Damn, but he hates this not knowing what’s happened. Sam is worried too and that isn’t helping. Sam’s supposed to be the voice of reason, the one that tells Dean not to worry.

And speaking of which, Dean nudges the ‘voice of reason’ with his elbow. “What now?”

Sam snorts as he jerks awake. They’ve driven along the interstate and made good time, but they didn’t start off until nearly noon and it’s just past midnight now. Dean’s tired and Sam’s been snoring for half an hour.

Sam peers out of the window, wiping some condensation off the glass. “You want to check the motels to see where Cas is staying?” he asks unenthusiastically around a yawn. 

Greeley’s no small, one-horse town. It’s got an airport, university and no end of motels and hotels. And yes, Dean does want to check the motels. He wants to check them right now, go through their guest registers, ask them if they’ve got his dark-haired, blue-eyed, yay-high friend staying with them, healthy and uninjured, with maybe a broken phone. It’s not really very practical though at this time of night. The receptions will be open and manned but the people manning them won’t be in the best mood for answering questions.

Dean reluctantly shakes his head. “Nah. We’ll start in the morning.”

“Early,” Sam says, nodding his head to emphasize the thought.

“Yeah. Damn straight.”

Dean turns the car into the drive of the first affordable-looking motel they come to after the decision’s made. It feels wrong and he almost has second thoughts at the idea of wasting five hours while he and Sam catch some sleep, and Greeley wakes up. He keeps going though, gritting his teeth and sliding into a parking bay near the tacky reception that’s missed at least three seasons of necessary repainting. 

He makes himself feel less guilty about taking the break before searching for Cas by showing a picture he’s got of Sam and Cas lounging by a lake to the middle-aged woman on reception. They might as well start here.

“Have you seen our friend?” he asks when she gives him their key. Sam’s hanging around outside and the woman glances his way.

“The other one,” Dean says trying not to roll his eyes and sound too patronizing.

The woman must be about fifty, grey peppering her otherwise brown hair, exhausted looking. There’s this weird streak of red in her hair above one ear that Dean tries very hard not to stare at – it looks like she fell asleep in a pool of food coloring. Maybe it’s some kind of punk mid-life crisis.

“Yeah. I seen him,” she says and Dean jerks his eyes back to her face and stares in disbelief. He grabs the edge of the counter with both hands to hold himself steady.

“Really?” It seems like one hell of a coincidence but Dean supposes it isn’t really, after all this is the first motel that isn’t geared up for well-off university student parents when you’re heading into Greeley, if you’re coming from Lebanon. Still, the luck of it has knocked the wind out of him.

The woman looks at him like he’s an imbecile and Dean doesn’t really blame her. “Your friends of his, you say?”

“Yeah. We haven’t heard from him for a few days. We were supposed to meet him but weren’t sure where he was staying.”

There’s a gust of air on the back of Dean’s neck as the door to reception is opened.

“Everything okay?” Sam asks from behind Dean. Dean doesn’t turn around. 

“This lady says she’s seen Cas,” Dean says, and Sam gasps in a breath. 

“Is he staying here?” Sam asks. He sounds excited, pleased, relieved. Dean won’t feel the same until Cas is there, with them. The woman looks wary at Sam’s eagerness. 

“He was,” she says, and not for the first time, Dean’s glad of his glass-half-empty approach to life. Save’s on a hell of a lot of disappointments. “I haven’t seen him for maybe four days and Maria, who cleans, says he hasn’t used the room. Bed not slept in, Maria says.” She looks from Dean to Sam and back again. “His car’s still here and so is his stuff. Room’s not paid for past yesterday but we’re not busy so I left his things in the room. Told the police and all.” She shrugs. “If you’re his friends maybe you want to take the room and take his things? Room’s clean. It’s a double, too. You could settle up his account, maybe,” she says, trailing off.

Dean hands back the key he was given. “Sure,” he says. He doesn’t even try to smile.

The woman hands them a new key. She looks relieved as if they’ve solved one big headache for her. “Room twelve,” she says and points along the block.

Dean and Sam don’t talk as they collect their bags from the car and head to the room. They open the door to room twelve with unreasonable hope, but it’s empty of course. Just one more dark, dingy, boring, silent motel room except that Cas’s bag is on one of the beds, wide open, contents strewn haphazardly and spread wide. Sam peers over Dean’s shoulder. 

“Has someone been through Cas’s stuff?” he asks.

Dean peers at the mess feeling helpless, but shakes his head none-the-less. “How would we tell? Cas is the untidiest person I’ve ever known.” He brushes his fingers against the rough cloth of Cas’s duffel as Sam huffs in weary amusement and weaves around him into the room. Cas bought himself this duffel as soon as he realized he was going to have to carry stuff that he couldn’t magic in and out of existence as he needed it and Dean never thought about it before but it’s almost an exact copy of his and Sam’s bags. Jeez, but talk about poor role models. 

Moving his attention further into the room, Dean looks for anything that’ll give something away as to what’s happened. The other bed, although it must be the one Cas has been sleeping in, is made up and unused as the woman at the registration desk had said, but a pair of pajama pants lies in a neat fold at the pillow end. They’re blue, striped soft Cotton and Dean recognizes them instantly from rare days when Cas has padded lazily around the bunker. The motel cleaner must have folded them as Cas never would have.

Sam walks across the room while Dean’s still staring, and picks up the pajama pants, screwing them into a tight ball in his fist. When he speaks his voice is strained. “Something’s obviously wrong.”

Funnily enough it’s the total absurdity of that statement that gets Dean moving. “No shit, Sherlock,” he snarks. He gets bitch-face number thirteen for his troubles and Dean hides a small satisfied smile as he turns back to the bed that has the contents of Cas’s bag strewn all over it. 

“Check the drawers,” he directs Sam, pointing behind him to the small dresser that’s stood against one wall while he’s already casting his eyes over the disorganized pile of items on the bed, not bothering to register if Sam does as he instructed.

Dean starts from the left. There’s a carrier bag with some dirty clothes in that Dean’s not going to touch. There’s a few clean clothes too - a pair of thin, black cargo pants that Dean tried to dissuade Cas from buying a couple of months ago (he’s actually pretty certain that’s why Cas bought them), two cheap grey t-shirts from the Walmart multi-packs that they all share, one plain blue button-ups that has never seen an iron, three pairs of black cotton boxers, one pair of tatty grey dress socks, and one pair of soft alpaca wool socks that Sam bought Cas to stop him wandering around the bunker barefoot. It’s pretty much Cas’s entire wardrobe barring a pair of Dean’s jeans that don’t fit him anymore and that Cas was wearing when he left the house.

Cas’s journal is still in his bag, tucked right down the bottom under a magazine about men’s health that Dean turns his nose up at (Sam probably got it for him), and a copy of Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ that Dean recognizes from the doodle on the back cover as his. Cas didn’t ask to borrow it but then Cas still has only a vague sense of property, and rather than minding, Dean’s actually quite pleased.

“Dean,” Sam says urgently and Dean turns around to see Sam holding up Cas’s jacket, a thrift store light-tan leather that Cas is kind of attached to and rarely goes out without. Dean scowls at it.

“Nothing else in the drawers,” Sam says and Dean watches him cross to the sliding wardrobe squeezed into one corner of the room. The track squeals as Sam slides the door across.

Dean turns back to the bed, picks up Cas’s journal and flicks through the pages. Cas has only just started keeping it but Dean knows it’s something else he wouldn’t go far without. It all adds up to Dean inwardly cursing himself for waiting so long before he decided to come looking. Dean finds the last page that’s got an entry on and it’s dated five days ago, the day before they last heard from Cas. 

Dean reads the entry for clues as to what Cas was hunting and where he might have gone but it looks as if Cas had only just started out and he’d got as far as noting the facts of the case. Disappearances, and in some cases reappearances - and that definitely bears investigation - but Cas hasn’t made reference to any conclusions he’d drawn about what might be causing it.

“Toiletries are all here,” Sam says, his voice getting louder as he walks from the bathroom back into the bedroom. “Anything in that?” Sam nods towards the pile on the bed.

Dean moves some of the clothes around but turns up nothing except the keys to Cas’s car and the bunker, and a couple of fake IDs. 

“Nothing unexpected,” he says . He’s trying not to think worst case about this scenario but he’s not having a lot of luck. At the moment he’s just holding on to the hope that Cas is still alive by a thin thread.

“He expected to come back,” Sam says, heaving an anxious breath. He nods at the journal that Dean dropped on the bed. “Any clues in that?” Dean shakes his head and looks around the room again. By rights there should be at least papers, notes, photos, something that got Cas started on this case in the first place, and the details of what he’s found out since. “Bare minimum in the journal. There must be other stuff.”

Dean ducks down and peers under the beds while Sam checks the nightstand. Under the end of the bed nearest the door, Dean finds Cas’s boots where they’d presumably been kicked off. He pulls them out. Okay, the journal he can make up all sorts of stories why it might be left behind. The jacket, ditto. But Cas’s boots? There is no scenario that Dean can think of where Cas would leave voluntarily without his boots. When Dean drags his mind back from the horrors in his imagination and re-focuses, Sam’s staring at him.

“Dean… “

“Keep looking,” Dean says gruffly, dropping the boots back onto the carpet. The last thing he needs right now is sympathy.

They eventually find the research pile in Cas’s car, underneath the passenger seat.

Sam pulls his hair back off his face with a heavy hand and holds it there. “So he was abducted from the motel and nothing’s missing?” Sam doesn’t have to say that in their world no robbery is bad news, not good.

Dean looks around at the motel’s plain brick walls and spots what he expected, CCTV cameras, pointing along the walkway with a good view of every doorway in this block. He turns his head and there’s another on the corner of the next block. “Let’s hope they don’t overwrite every day,” he mutters, heading for reception.  
***

As luck would have it the motel wipes its recordings at completely irregular times and they do have recordings from the whole of the past week but that’s all the information they get at one o’clock in the morning. The woman at reception is now not only suspicious but on the verge of very real fear, her eyes flicking subconsciously to the edge of the counter, where no doubt there’s either a panic button or a gun, when Dean tries to persuade her to let them watch the security tapes right now, this second. 

Sam grabs Dean’s elbow and starts to pull him away. “You’re quite right,” Sam tells the woman contritely. “It’s late, you’re on your own, you don’t want to be having to deal with this right now.” 

But patience isn’t one of Dean’s virtues. He’d been prepared to wait when he thought they were going to have to traipse around a hundred-odd motels and hotels and deal with a hundred-odd stroppy and paranoid night staff manning a hundred-odd registration desks, but now they know Cas was here Dean doesn’t want to wait anymore.

Sam pulls at his elbow. “Dean, let’s go. Come back in the morning,” Sam says. It’s an order, not a suggestion and Dean doesn’t take orders from Sam. The more Dean digs his heels in though, stubbornly refusing to move, the more anxious the woman becomes. “He’s very worried about our friend,” Sam says to the woman while burying his fingertips into the flesh of Dean’s arm so hard that Dean’s sure he’s going to have bruises. The bastard’s doing it deliberately. “We’re both kind of worried about our friend, but we’ll come back in a few hours when it’s daylight.” Sam lowers his voice and hisses, annoyed, in Dean’s ear. “She won’t let us see the tapes at all if you keep scaring the crap out of her.”

“And you’ll have to ask the boss,” she says warily. “He’ll be in around six.”

“Yeah, we’ll do that. We’ll come back then, Thanks.” Sam yanks at Dean’s arm and successfully dislodges his feet from where they were seemingly stuck to the floor. It gets him moving reluctantly. He knows Sam’s right of course, but he’s not waiting five hours, no way.

As soon as he gets outside and Sam shuts the door behind them and finally lets go of his arm, he says so.

“No, we’re not,” Sam says starting to walk away and tilting his head to indicate for Dean to follow. “C’mon, she’ll get worried again if we linger.” Dean walks fast to catch up, as his long-legged brother strides away.

“What do you mean we’re not?”

“You think her boss is going to let us see those tapes, because I don’t? She might have, but as soon as she said no it was no point arguing.” Dean follows Sam as he makes his way all the way back to their room. 

“So what, then?” he asks. “Because I’m going to get those tapes one way or another, Sam. We are going to find Cas, and he is going to be alive.” Maybe if Dean keeps saying that out loud it’ll be the truth.

Sam flicks a glance at Dean, then puts the key in the lock, opens the door and ushers Dean in. “You can bet she’s watching us now on the CCTV,” he says, following Dean in and shutting the door. “So we wait until she’s calmed down, then we go in the back and we borrow them.” 

***

Getting the tapes by climbing in and out the (open, for God’s sake!) rear window of reception was so frigging easy it was laughable. They plug the tape from four days ago, the day they know Cas was last seen, into the fancy converter come player gizmo Sam’s got, and they crowd around the laptop screen to watch.

In the most part it’s ridiculously boring but that’s only to be expected. From the tape and the cars it looks as if there was only three rooms occupied in their block that night, all in the center and with empty rooms in between the occupied ones. Number twelve, Cas’s room - their room - is the furthest of the three from reception and the road. 

Dean and Sam fast forward through the hours of nothing happening, then slow the tape back down again to watch at normal speed when there’s something other than a row of rooms in a concrete block and a few leaves being blown across the parking lot. 

They watch the occupants of the two other rooms leave, one couple dressed up to the nines, presumably going for dinner, leave early evening, come back three hours later and are back in their room by ten-thirty. The lights go out a half hour later. 

The other room is occupied by a family with two adults and one small child. They come back twenty minutes after they leave with bags of food from some independent fast food restaurant if the burger artwork on the bags is to be believed. The kid’s got a DVD in its hand. Their lights go out around twelve. 

At twelve-thirty a small black alley cat comes scrounging, and sniffs it’s way along the walkway. It gets chased off by another larger cat with half its ear missing. 

Cas turns up at around two in the morning just when Dean was starting to think they’d got their time calculations wrong, or that the maid that reported Cas not using his room had. He was beginning to think they were going to have to do this again with the next night’s tape. He’s leaning back to rub the crick in his neck when Sam pokes him suddenly. “There,” he says, pointing at the screen.

Cas is walking through the car parking area on foot. The footage isn’t great quality and there’s very little light and Cas was easier to pick out when he still had his trench coat but he’s got a distinctively determined stride and Dean would recognize him anywhere just from the way he moves. Dean and Sam both lean forward watching for anything unusual. 

Cas has nothing in his hands and he’s wearing his jacket and his boots. He walks in from the direction of the main road and there’s nothing odd in that. In fact it’s difficult not to walk in that way with the layout of the motel being the way it is. Cas walks once around his car, maybe checking everything is as he left it, and then walks straight to the motel room door and puts the key in and turns it. Dean’s eyes subconsciously flick towards the door. He knows Sam notices and Dean will thank him later for not calling him on it, but for now he turns back to the laptop screen. Cas opens the door and disappears into the room, then the door closes. 

This is when it’s supposed to get interesting, when whoever it is that abducted Cas turns up. They keep watching the tape. The lights in Cas’s room never go out, or at least not until dawn when it’s no longer possible to see the glow bleeding through the thin material of the curtains. No-one visits the room and no-one leaves. The tape finishes. They put the next one in and check that. No-one visits and no-one leaves. Then the next tape, then the next. Sam frowns at the time-stamp. Nearly mid-day and Cas hasn’t reappeared. Cas is a frigging early riser when he sleeps, irrespective of what time he goes to bed. Dean picks anxiously at a hang nail. Then at a quarter past midday, the maid comes, not much more than a kid, pushing her trolley of cleaning equipment slowly along the sidewalk in front of the rooms. 

Dean peers anxiously at the screen. The maid knocks, waits, knocks, waits. Then, presumably not getting a response, she fishes out her key and opens the door. It’s so damn frustrating that they can’t see what’s going on in the room. Dean half-expects the woman to come running out of the room screaming and his skin is tingling with anticipation but all that happens is that after a couple of minutes she comes out with towels, dumps them in a bag on her trolley, lifts new ones and heads back into the room again. 

“He’s not there,” Dean says, looking at Sam, baffled. “But he didn’t leave.”

Sam stretches, looking as perplexed as Dean feels. “No.” Sam’s arms reach up over his head as he teases the tightness out of his muscles. Dean stands up. He walks to the back of the room, looks all over the ceiling, checks the bathroom, walks back into the main room. Kicks at the floor but he knows it’s concrete. 

“There’s no frigging way out of here other than that door,” he says, pointing accusingly at the innocuous looking gray rectangle they’ve been using to get in and out through since they got here.

“Obviously there must be. We just have to find it, and,” Sam looks at his watch, “we need to get these tapes back before they’re missed.” Dean looks at his watch too. It’s five in morning.

“Yeah, okay, but keep that one.” He nods to the tape Sam’s just taken out of the machine, the one with Cas getting back to the room. “They won’t notice one missing.” Sam nods in agreement and gathers up the other tapes. 

“I’ll be back in five,” Sam says.

“Yeah, okay,” Dean murmurs, already focused elsewhere. He eyes the grubby utility carpet looking for the best place to start peeling it away from the floor. Checking for supernatural signs on the concrete seems a good place to start.

***

There’s nothing under the carpet. Sam Came back after the promised five minutes and between them the hauled the carpet back to check every inch of the floor and the underneath of the carpet for good measure. 

While they were doing that they find another stash of papers, wrapped in a black plastic trash bag, hidden by the shadows way back in the corner under one of the beds. There’s a lot in it - books, papers, drawings, notes, police case files - and they both dedicate some time to skimming through what’s there in the hope of throwing some light on what happened to Cas. Nothing immediately jumps out at them though so they put the notes to one side while they carry on with their search of the room. If there’s one thing they know for sure, the last place Cas was seen was in this room.

It takes them another five hours, and apologies to the maid and does she mind not cleaning the room today (not surprisingly, the answer’s no), before they find anything else and Dean’s been getting quietly frantic. He’s had so many years of panic-filled days with Sam that looking after Sam is second nature, but Cas… Cas wheedled his way under Dean’s skin and into his life and now Dean can’t imagine his life without him, and he can’t imagine not taking care of Cas the way he takes care of Sam. 

Sam laughs at him for it sometimes, but Dean can see by the way Sam is drinking too much coffee and running a frequent shaky hand through his hair while they tear the room apart, that he feels the same way. So when Sam breathes out that he’s found something, sounding as if he hardly believes it himself, Dean’s just grateful that his brother understands.

“What is it?” Dean crouches down in the corner beside Sam. Sam has a little corner of torn wallpaper in his hand that had been hidden behind one of the beds before they stood the bed up against the dresser. 

Dean peers forward but can’t see enough so he grabs the edge of the wallpaper and pulls it further off the wall. Sam watches him, quiet beside him, so quiet Dean can hardly hear him breathe.

On the wall is an intricate drawing of interlocking shapes in a mix of dark gray and red on the cream wall. Most of the symbols are just simple squares and circles, parallelograms, and triangles but there are a couple that are occult in origin and stand out in bright red, almost glowing, against the duller colors of the other shapes. Still, Dean has no idea what he’s looking at.

“So?” Dean asks probably a little more aggressively than he should but it would have been nice if, instead of some obtuse symbols, it’d actually been a little map with a bit ‘X’ and ‘Cas is here’ written on it.

“It’s a portal key,” Sam says breathlessly, staring at the drawing in excitement. He shuffles forward on one knee and ducks his head to examine it more closely. “I’ve only ever seen one once before. Bobby showed me - it was a case Rufus worked a while back. People, and even some monsters, disappearing from Kansas City of all places. 

“In Rufus’ case, some of the people came back.”

“Like here,” Dean says, remembering Cas’s notes.

“Like here,” Sam confirms.

Dean settles back on his heels and questions pour out of him in a desperate need to know. “Portal to where? Is that where Cas is? So he’s alive?”

“Dean, I don’t know,” Sam says, rocking back to crouch next to Dean and turning to talk to him. “Portal to another world? Another dimension? A parallel universe? Rufus never found out that I know of and his notes went up in flames along with the rest of Bobby’s house. As for the rest? I don’t know if that’s where Cas is or even if that’s where I want him to be, and as to whether he’s alive or not… ” Sam trails off and shakes his head.

After a pause, Dean asks, “So how do we use the key? How do we get into this other dimension or whatever?”

“I don’t know that either,” Sam says, and then he stands up with sudden determination. “But we’re going to find out.” 

***

Dean puts the room back together while Sam browses his laptop for anything he’s got on portals. Sam’s got a few of the books in the library converted in to some kind of electronic format so that he can get hold of what he needs when he’s out and about, but as it turns out not the one he wants, obviously, because their life sucks. 

They try looking through the contents of Cas’s trash bag of papers again and on the plus side, now that they know a bit more about what they’re looking for, they find several sketches of different portal keys, though none of them are the same as the one in this room. On the down side, there’s no organization that Dean can tell with Cas’s papers and trying to find everything they need from the huge collection of notes is going to take hours, days maybe, and they need to find a quicker way of getting to the answer. 

Dean scrapes his short fingernails across his scalp in frustration. When they get Cas back Dean’s going to teach him the value of being tidy.

“I’ll need to go back to the bunker for the book,” Sam says, resigned. It’ll take Sam half a day to drive back and then another half a day coming back to Greeley with the book, and he’s going to need to grab some sleep in between. Dean’s determined that he himself is going to die falling asleep at the wheel of the Impala, he just thinks it will be sickly ironic after the danger in their day to day lives, but he doesn’t want Sam to. If Sam goes back to the bunker they’re going to lose more than a day before they can get into the portal.

“What about the local library?” Dean asks rubbing a palm anxiously up and down the front of his jeans at the thought of losing another thirty-odd hours when they don’t even know if Cas even went through this damn portal thing. What if they manage to get a look inside and Cas isn’t there? They’ll have to start again trying to work out where the hell he went when he disappeared from this room. It’s looking more likely from Cas’s sketches that the portal idea is the right one but Cas could have been on the wrong track too.

Sam flops back onto the bed and closes his eyes. He’s tired already, neither of them have slept for over a day. 

“I doubt the local library will cut it. Not for something this specific and I could waste time looking when I could be driving.” He gives a huge sigh, opens his eyes and turns his head to look at Dean. “I should go.” He doesn’t sit up though and Dean can tell it’s the last thing he wants to do.

“What about other hunters - Garth, Jody… will they have the book, or maybe they’ve seen this before?” Dean can tell Sam’s about to say no automatically but then he pauses.

“Garth,” Sam says, sitting bolt upright on the bed. “The last time I saw him he was talking on and on about this other world that he found a way in to. I wasn’t really listening because he tends to go on, you know. But maybe?”

Sam’s phone is lying on top of his duffel just behind Dean. Dean picks it up and throws it to him. It bounces softly as it lands on the bed. Sam doesn’t waste any time, scrolling down his contacts and dialing.

Garth picks up after five rings, and then Sam’s talking, explaining to Garth what’s happening, explaining about Cas, explaining about the key, explaining about everything they know which when Sam puts it into succinct sentences for Garth’s benefit sounds disappointingly little.

After that Sam’s on the phone for almost an hour with Garth doing the majority of the talking, Sam occasionally acknowledging that he’s listening and understanding with soft grunts. While Sam’s busy doing that, Dean starts sifting through Cas’s notes and sorting them into piles, by case: The first’s an older teenager not seen for two months, the next, a middle-aged mother who reappeared a few weeks after she disappeared. Dean puts that one in a separate pile of people to talk to. The next case was a man in his twenties, and this one’s strange. Cas has made a lot of notes about deaths in the area all over this guy’s case sheet. If Dean didn’t know better, he’d say the deaths were caused by a werewolf. How many cases was Cas working here for God’s sake? Dean puts that sheet in a new pile and keeps going.

When he’s done he’s got a whopping total of ten people that disappeared for good, never seen again. Three that disappeared and reappeared anything from a few weeks to a few months later. Then there’s two that are cases all on their own. One is the probable werewolf that Dean found first, the second he’s not too sure but he thinks kitsune. Then he’s got a pile of random papers which is everything else that Cas had. He’s just staring at his four piles of paper wondering what to do next when Sam hangs up. Dean lifts an eyebrow in query.

“It sounds the same,” Sam says. He stands up and stretches. “Garth’s going to email me some stuff to be sure but it really does sound the same.”

Sam grabs a bottle of water from the fridge and moves over to his laptop. The email notification pops up about ten minutes later.

Garth’s documentation is a hell of a lot more organized than Cas’s. Dean leans over Sam’s shoulder and points excitedly when he recognizes two of the portal key drawings. He goes back to Cas’s pile and digs them out.

Sam glances at them then back to Garth’s notes, nodding keenly. “According to Garth, there are different symbols but as far as he can tell they’re all keys to get into the same place. He thinks there might be a different key for each species but he couldn’t prove it.” Sam points to the key Dean’s got in his left hand. “Garth thinks that one lets werewolves through.” Dean pulls out the notes about the werewolf and yeah, it fits. 

“Cas says this key was found in this guy’s kitchen, and Cas thought he was a werewolf.”

The symbols for the maybe-kitsune that Cas sketched is similar to the werewolf’s though not quite the same, and that one doesn’t pop up in Garth’s list. There’s another victim in Cas’s research that ended up in the pile of ten that Dean had pegged as normal people that also has a similar portal key. Maybe he’s getting rusty because if there’s a pattern, that makes her some kind of monster too. He’d never have spotted the woman for a monster, and Cas’s big question mark shows he was uncertain too.

“What about the one here in this room?” Dean asks, jerking his head to indicate the corner behind him where the portal key symbols still hide under their corner of wallpaper.

Sam shakes his head. “Garth doesn’t have that one either. I might be able to work it out,” he says, his brow furrowing as he thinks about it. “There’s logic to the keys.”

“Unless we have to work it out to get Cas back, it can wait,” Dean says because he can tell by the far off look on Sam’s face he’s starting to get all geeky about this. He points to the laptop screen. “And on that subject, is there anything in that lot that will help us get Cas back?”

“Actually, yeah,” Sam says. He turns around and takes the second key drawing that Dean has in his hand, then brings up a matching image in Garth’s papers. There’s a definite edge of excitement in his voice. “This is the key for humans if Garth’s theory about the keys being species-specific is right.”

“So we can go where Cas went?” Dean asks. Sam nods. “What about getting back. It’s not going to do a lot of good if we all get stuck wherever Cas is.”

“Remember one or two people manage to come back? That means there’s a way out.” Sam brings up another symbol on the laptop that’s almost identical to the human one. “And Garth thinks this is it.

“So why hasn’t Cas come out if he can – if he’s in there at all?” Dean asks.

Sam doesn’t answer, just shakes his head quietly. He doesn’t know. 

***

If Dean could know for sure that Cas is on the other side of this so-called portal they’re trying to get through he’d be a lot damn happier about the 24 hours it takes while Sam tracks down a spell to use with the key, then sends Dean out to collect all the obscure ingredients.

Finally though they have everything Sam says they need and although they’re both dead on their feet, because Dean can’t remember the last time either of them slept, they’re both keen to get going.

“Ready?” Sam asks, and Dean nods, not even waiting for Sam as he holds the copy of the key while he dips his fingers into a bowl of ashy, smelly spell ingredients, drawing a pattern on his arm and reciting the long-ass spell that’s written word for word on the paper next to the symbols. Sam beside him does the same, starting off slightly behind Dean but soon catching up so that the rhythm of their speech melds together as if one voice. Dean would bet his bottom dollar that Cas didn’t get through the portal this way, dragged through against his will more like, and Dean prays like hell that Cas is waiting, alive, on the other side for them, and they can bring him home.

Dean expects to be ripped forcefully from one reality to the other and is steeling himself for the agony of the passage, but it isn’t like that at all. In fact when they reach the end of the spell Dean looks around the motel room, baffled. The beds are where they were, he’s still in the same spot he was in before, the damn-awful wallpaper is still on the walls. 

“Did it work?” he asks Sam. It comes out slightly desperate and he tries to calm down. Dean’s been working on hunter-autopilot for a while, since they got to Greeley really, jumping from one step forward to the next with his anxiety and concern for Cas blocked out in between because it would drive him mad if he let it take over, but now he’s practically vibrating with barely concealed nervous energy.

Sam walks to the corner of the room that has the portal key hidden under the wallpaper and crouches down. “There shouldn’t be a key on the other side of the portal - this side of the portal, if it worked.” Sam lifts up the corner of wallpaper but Dean can’t see past his brother’s broad back. He stamps a foot to remind Sam there are people waiting.

“It’s not there,” Sam says, scowling at Dean’s impatience, but looking relieved as he turns and stands up. “We made it. It worked.”

“Then let’s go,” he urges Sam, but Sam’s busy scouting the room. 

“Our stuff’s not here,” Sam observes and Dean follows his cue and looks around. 

“Nor Cas’s.” Nor much of anyone’s stuff when it comes down to it.

Sam turns on the TV but there’s only static on every channel he tries. Dean stands in the middle of the room while Sam checks the bathroom and cupboards, coming out shaking his head in the negative but holding up a damp t-shirt. 

“Cas isn’t here, but is this his?” He looks back towards the bathroom. “It was hanging in there.” The t-shirt is nondescript thick cotton.

“Maybe, man. I don’t know.” Dean glances over to the bed and notes it’s been slept in, the sheets and covers a rumpled mess as if someone had a restless night. There’s no pajamas on the bed this time around. Someone’s using this room but there’s nothing to say if that person is Cas. There’s nothing here that’s useful so it’s time to get going. Dean walks over to the door of the room and opens it, jerking it inward aggressively, and staring back into the room to pointedly usher Sam outside.

Outside is where anything normal suddenly becomes un-normal. Sam stops so suddenly that Dean runs into the back of him.

“What?” he asks, edging around his brother to see what the problem is, because the thing is he hadn’t actually looked outside the door when he’d opened it. When he looks now he comes to a halt too, snapping his surprised gaping mouth shut after a second or two of staring.

What was the city of Greeley is now no more than a few buildings, of which the motel room is one, but instead of standing in a block as it had, it stands on its own with nothing around it - no reception, no other rooms and no other blocks. It sits on its own little foundation, with its own little stretch of pavement outside, but no cars. The ground outside and around seems to be regular tarmac though all the painted markings, pot holes and cracks that were there on the other side are only present immediately around their motel room.

Dean stares around, doing a turn just outside the door. There are other buildings, not many, standing lonely in isolated spots. There’s no sign of a single person though Dean thinks he hears a distant car engine.

Sam points to a building on the other side of a short stretch of road, the name “Hobson’s Coffee” displayed in bright neon in the window. “That was on the other side of the street from the hotel. I saw it when I took the tapes back, but it wasn’t that close - it was fifty yards or so further up the road.”

Dean looks up the traffic-less road in the other direction and his eyes widen when he spots a large mechanic’s garage. “That was on our way in. I remember it because of that old Buick parked outside. It was two miles further out of town though.” He looks at Sam for inspiration, after all he’s supposed to be the brains of the outfit, but Sam just fidgets where he stands as if unwilling to move, and he doesn’t offer any enlightenment.

“Well,” Dean says with a huff and a determined stride forward, “I could really do with a coffee and we’ve got to start somewhere.”

‘Hobson’s Coffee’ is packed, which is maybe why there’s no-one outside because they’re all inside. It's hella loud too, cutlery and crockery clattering and peoples voices babbling in excited chatter. It’s not as if it’s lunchtime. Well actually when Dean thinks about it he has no idea what time it is but his stomach isn’t telling him it’s lunchtime. 

Sam looks taken aback by the scene, letting his eyes roam the room with his eyebrows somewhere up near his hairline. Then a girl comes up to them, seeming genuinely happy to see them instead of the normal robotic smile of the harried waitress, and looks at them sympathetically. 

“You new?”

Dean looks at Sam, raising an eyebrow as if to ask ‘are we new?’ but Sam yet again is not the font of all knowledge so Dean answers a very tentative, “Yes?”, and then jumps as Sam grabs his arm and points wildly. Dean looks in the direction Sam’s finger is indicating, and there, stuck in a table in the corner on his own, face tense and focused on a salt cellar in his hand, is Cas. Dean’s half way across the room, weaving his way around the other tables before he can think.

“Cas!” he calls out when he gets closer to Cas’s table. Cas doesn’t acknowledge him.

He hears the girl behind them proclaiming in an excited voice, “Oh, you know someone. How nice.”

Sam catches up with him and they take the last few strides together. Cas has turned the salt cellar upside down and is using it to lay down doodles of salt on the tablecloth, only the doodles are half-realized sigils that Cas brushes away in frustration as Dean and Sam approach him.

“Cas?” Dean says, tentatively, eyes skimming over Cas quickly for any signs of injury. There’s nothing obvious which at last is something working in their favor. 

Cas looks up surprised, only just noticing them. He looks at them, his eyes narrowing and his hand dipping below the table where Dean would lay money there’s a knife, gun or angel blade. Not fully understanding what’s going on, but not willing to take any chances, Dean takes a half-step back out of the immediate danger zone, instinctively tugging Sam with him.

“Do I know you?” Cas growls.

Dean wavers because this is one of his worst nightmares - he still remembers the last time Cas forgot who he was, and it’s not pleasant.

“You are Cas, right? Castiel?” Sam asks which saves Dean from finding the words for which he’s immensely grateful.

“So I’m told,” Cas answers slowly. He’s wary and suspicious, and Dean hates it.

“Um, okay,” Sam says uncertainly. He hesitates, then, “Can we join you?”

Cas thinks about it for a moment, looking from one to the other, then he nods. He tugs the spare seat that’s right next to him into the table with his foot around one of the chair legs so that neither Dean nor Sam can sit there, and waves at the other two empty seats opposite with one hand while the other still sits not-so-casually under the table. 

Cas may have lost his memory but he hasn’t lost his soldier instinct.

Cas repeats his question. “Do I know you?”

“Yeah, Cas. We’re friends. The best,” Sam says earnestly.

Dean still hasn’t found his voice and Cas turns to look at him. He looks as if he’s concentrating, trying hard to remember so Dean tries a tentative smile. Cas doesn’t smile back, just tilts his head a little to the side.

The girl who greeted them comes over with a pot of coffee. 

“He’ll remember if you talk to him,” she says, looking at Dean in particular, or so it seems to Dean but maybe he’s just being paranoid. She pours them all coffee without asking, topping up Cas’s half-empty cup. Cas nods his thanks, still staring at Dean. It’s starting to make Dean feel uncomfortable and he got used to Cas’s staring a long time ago but it’s so intense, a notch up from normal intense.

“It’s busy in here,” Dean says to the waitress to try and distract his attention from the staring.

The girl grins happily, looking around her at the crowded café. She seems like one of those naturally happy people that Dean’s never understood and always found incredibly irritating.

“It’s the only place in town. There was another but the owner opted to go back.”

“Go back?” Sam asks, looking open and genuinely interested which is more than Dean can manage right now. He sneaks a side-eyed glance at Cas only to find him staring right back at him, still. Dean looks away. Jesus. He can just about cope with feeling as he does about Cas when Cas is just being who Cas is, when they just are what they are, but not like this. Not when, even without remembering who Dean is, Cas is looking at him trying to puzzle him out.

“Yes, of course,” the girl burbles happily on, “They’ll give you a choice in a couple of weeks. Didn’t they tell you that at your induction? Oh.” she says in sudden jaw-dropping anxiety. “Oh, I’m sorry. Unless you’re not human.” Her smile falters. “What are you? We’ve got two werewolves and a demon and a kitsune so you’re not alone.” She indicates Cas with her head and a fond smile. “We haven’t figured Cas here out yet. We thought he was human but he can’t get out so he can’t be.”

“I can’t get out?” Cas asks, then in a mumble to himself, “Have I even tried?” Cas’s brow creases even further than it had already as he concentrates on trying to remember. It makes Dean want to reach out and squeeze his arm in a gesture of support but he’s not sure if he’d get away with it without being shot or stabbed by whatever Cas has under the table. He settles for another small smile thrown in Cas’s direction which just makes Cas frown harder.

“Yeah, Hun. Yesterday,” the girl says, carrying on oblivious. “It’s why you’re not remembering so well today. It gave you a hell of a bounce back.” She looks back to Sam and Dean. “And you two? Hey, maybe you three are all from the same pack or hive or whatever. That’d be cool.” It’s a little disturbing how excited she looks at the thought. She starts to remind Dean uncomfortably of Becky Rosen. He peers at her name badge to make sure, but it says ‘Susan’ plain and clear.

“We’re human,” Sam says, undoubtedly disillusioning her. “I guess we missed the induction.” If she thinks that’s odd she doesn’t comment, just smiles brightly. Someone a few tables across calls for more coffee and with a “catch you later,” Susan wanders off to serve other tables from the pot of coffee. Dean’s grateful because she’s wearing him out with all the damn smiling.

“Jeepers,” Sam says huffing out a breath. “You know she reminded me of - “

“Becky. I know,” Dean interrupts. Sam snorts with laughter. Cas looks confused, which is a step up from ready to smite something. Dean smiles at Cas again, but his frown comes back. Dean rolls his eyes. He’s not going to win today.

Dean takes a sip of his coffee. Not half bad, all considering. “So, you want to get out of here?” he asks Cas.

“With you?” Cas asks. His hand is still under the table.

“Yeah. Like Sam says, we’re best buddies. We came here to get you out.” 

Cas tilts his head and finally the hand comes out from under the table. The make-shift blade in it is tucked surreptitiously into the inside of his jacket. 

“I don’t know why I want to leave, or what I have to go back to - “ Dean does not flinch at that, he doesn’t! “But I definitely do want to get out of here. Wherever this is, I don’t belong, and I sense it’s not safe for me here.” Cas stands up, and Dean and Sam do the same. “So yes, if you think you can get me out of here, let’s go.”

If Dean thought this meant that Cas had decided to trust them, he was wrong. He ushers them in front of him to walk out through the busy café, Sam leading, Dean following, and Cas a sufficient distance behind Dean that he can strike and fight if he has to. It makes Dean’s back prickle uncomfortably but he really wants Cas to trust them so he forces himself to walk calmly and slowly behind Sam until they get outside.

Outside, the street is just as empty as it was before and it’s quiet after the cacophony of the café. 

“Go on,” Cas prompts when they hesitate on the sidewalk.

Dean looks at Sam, raises an eyebrow and by silent, mutual agreement they start off towards the lonely motel room across the road. Dean has no idea if they need to do this in the motel room but he’s a bit worried that they’d end up in a wall or something if they do it somewhere they can’t fix geographically. He’s seen those movies.

Instinctively, Dean looks both ways before he crosses the road, then feels foolish when Sam grins at him. As he turns his head though, he catches Cas out of the corner of his eye waiting for them to get further on before he follows. It’s strange seeing that distrustful look back on Cas’s face after so many years. Susan had said the amnesia would wear off and it can’t be soon enough for Dean. 

“I’m staying in there,” Cas says, squinting against the glare of the sun as they approach the glossy painted door with its tacky chrome number twelve. He sounds surprised as if he’s just remembered that, which he possibly has. 

“Yeah, we know.” 

Sam and Cas both pull out a room key at the same time. Cas nods at Sam to use his, still seeming more comfortable standing behind them with space between them. Dean turns to the door eager to be in and at it as soon as Sam’s opened it. The sudden fumble at his back makes him jump and he turns around sharply. Cas is staring at him wide-eyed, dropping his hand away from Dean’s jacket.

“Dean,” he says, his voice a low rumble of confusion. Cas turns his head to look at Sam. “And Sam.” Both his arms drop to his side and his hands make tight fists. “I remember you.” He has a pained look on his face as he looks around him, then turns a full three-sixty. “I don’t understand,” he states.

Sam steps forward right up to Cas’s shoulder and speaks to him urgently. “Do you remember how you got here? Do you remember that you tried to get back yesterday? Do you remember how you tried to get back? What about - “ Cas turns, looks pleadingly at Dean and takes a bumbling step back, then another, shaking his head, eyes slightly wild. Dean grabs Sam’s sleeve, holding him back. 

“Give him some space, Sam.”

“I remember none of that,” Cas says. His face hardens, the temporary anxiety subsiding, or perhaps just hidden behind a mask. “I remember you, I remember the bunker.” He pauses, schools his mouth into a hard line before gritting out. “I don’t remember me.”

“It’s okay, man,” Dean says, stepping forward slowly. “You’ll remember soon.” He beckons with one arm out, almost touching, wanting to touch, wanting to feel Cas solid under his palm. When Cas doesn’t step into it like he normally would, Dean drops his arm. Sam clears his throat. They’ve never talked about how Dean feels about Cas but Dean knows that Sam knows. Right now though he could do without the sad, understanding expression on his brother’s face . “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Dean growls.

Sam opens the door and Cas hovers just out of reach until Sam and Dean have both walked into the room, then he follows. Cas looks around the room.

“I don’t remember this either,” he says.

“It’s only a motel room, buddy, it doesn’t really matter,” Dean says. “And anyway we’ll be out of here in a minute.” Dean has never been as impatient in his life as he is impatient to be away from here and home. He shuffles on the spot in frustration while Sam seems to take his merry time getting the portal key drawings and spell out for himself and Cas. Dean’s had his in his hand for five minutes.

Sam hands Cas his copy of the papers. “Draw this on your skin, with this,” Sam hands over a little bag of the smelly, ashy stuff, “and recite the spell.”

“That’s it?” Cas asks. “It seems… too easy. What’s the catch?”

Sam shrugs apologetically. “The catch is that your symbol’s a little different from ours and I might have got the exit key wrong, though I’m pretty sure I haven’t.”

Cas looks at the piece of paper. “Why is my symbol different?”

“You’re not human,” Sam says bluntly and Dean feels like kicking him when Cas looks up, shocked.

“You’re as good as human, Cas. You’re not a monster like the others, I promise,” Dean says, stepping forward then stopping and inwardly cursing as Cas takes a step back.

“I’m pretty sure that the worst that can happen is that you just get to stay here for a few more hours while we work out the next step,” Sam says.

Cas stares at him, his face a picture of conflicting emotions. “And another day not remembering anything.”

“Yeah, possibly,” Sam says, apologetically.

“If you don’t want to – “ Dean starts.

“What choice do I have?” Cas interrupts tossing a look Dean’s way that makes it seem like a genuine question. When neither Dean nor Sam answer though, Cas seems to droop. “Let’s just do it.” 

They recite the spell, starting off out of sync but it’s a frigging long spell so by the end they’re perfectly in time with each other and they all three hit the last word together. Yet again it’s like nothing has changed. There’s no physical sensation of anything happening but Dean knows they’re on the original side of the portal because all their stuff is back, right where they left it. Although Sam had told him he was a hundred percent certain this would work for them, he’s still pleasantly surprised.

Until he looks around. Sam’s there, looking kind of upset. Dean turns to where Cas should be, but of course isn’t. 

“Where the hell is he?” Dean asks, despair clawing at his throat making his voice rough and raw.

“He’s not human,” Sam says, quietly as if he’s talking to himself or thinking out loud.

“He’s closer to being a human than he is to being an angel,” Dean spits out.

“That may be,” Sam says, “But that waitress said only humans could get out, and obviously Cas isn’t human enough.”

“That’s bullshit.” Cas eats, sleeps, bleeds. Cas feels things, emotions - he does. What the hell else does he need to do to qualify as human? “We should go back.” Dean points aggressively to illustrate his point. “Right now. I want to make sure he’s okay.”

“Dean, I’m sorry but we have to trust he is.” Sam shakes the little bag of spell ingredients. “We only have enough for a few more trips and I called in a load of favors to get this much. I don’t know if we can get more, and I don’t know how many different things we’re going to have to try to get Cas back. But we will get him back.”

“Yeah?” Dean asks, suddenly running out of steam and sitting down heavily on the edge of a bed. “You promise, Sammy?”

***

They sleep, and after they sleep, they split up. 

Sam works with the portal keys, comparing all the ones they have for similarities and differences, and drawing a new exit key for Cas, this time basing it on the human one in the hope of fooling the portal into thinking that Cas is human. Dean goes to see a café owner.

The café owner’s name and address are in Cas’s file, along with the date he disappeared and the date he returned but not much else – no interview notes and no portal key drawings which presumably means Cas hadn’t got around to him yet in the course of his investigation. 

When Dean pulls up outside the café in the impala, the café’s morning rush is still in full swing so he leans back and waits, staring unseeingly out of the windshield. In his head, he replays meeting up with Cas on the other side of the portal; confused and lost but still a bad-ass. Dean huffs in fond amusement. Bad-ass Cas who’s like this little kid sometimes in the bunker, endlessly fascinated by the way things work, how they feel when he touches them, how they taste, how light reflects off them… and he asks ‘why’ to everything. Why does this work like this? Why do you bake this, not boil it? Why do you read in bed at night and not in the morning? Why… ?

Why does Cas always leave? Why did Cas have to leave this time? What if they don’t get him back?

Dean sighs, his mood soured. He looks across at the café and a few people in corporate suits leave with serious faces, one obviously in charge talking as the others listen attentively, ducking slightly to her level. Soon the place will be empty and getting ready for the lunch crowd but at the moment it’s still over half full. Dean should wait a little longer but it’s getting harder and harder to keep his own company so Dean climbs out of the car and heads in. Even the clamor of the café is better as background noise than the thoughts in his head.

“Is Josh Rea here?” he asks the girl who comes to seat him. She looks over her shoulder back towards the kitchen where Dean can see through the serving gap that there’s still plenty of busy activity, two men and a woman moving gracefully around each other with pans and plates and food in hand.

“Yeah, but he’s kind of busy,” she says, turning back to Dean. “Can it wait?”

“Sure,” Dean says. He hadn’t really expected anything else and he’s shown to a table along one wall where he settles in with coffee and a too greasy blueberry muffin.

It’s a good half hour later when Josh Rea, the café owner, makes his way over to where Dean’s nursing his third cup of coffee. About sixty, he walks with a slight limp, and wears an impatient frown though he greets Dean politely enough.

“Can I help you? Sorry, but we’re kind of busy. Can you make it quick?” 

Yeah, Dean can make it quick.

“You spent some time in some weird-ass supernatural place, and then you came home ,” Dean says without any messing around and Rea’s eyes startle wide and he takes a step back as if Dean was the devil himself. Dean holds his hands up, palms open. 

“Whoa, man. Don’t worry, I’m on your side.”

Rea stands still and silent, warily looking Dean up and down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says at last.

“I’ve got a friend stuck in there. I’ve been there.” 

“Then you know we’re not supposed to talk about it.”

“See, no, I don’t know that. Got in and out on my own steam and missed the welcome committee.” Dean pushes one of the other chairs out from the table with his foot. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me what I don’t know.” Rea doesn’t move. “I’m not leaving until I get what I came for,” Dean says. His eyes haven’t left Rea’s face since the man came across but where his expression was open and encouraging he now lets it harden in warning. Reluctance visible in every muscle, Rea sits but he doesn’t settle, perching on the very edge of the chair. He swivels his head and looks around nervously but the café is mostly empty now and the only other occupied table is too far away to eavesdrop. Rea still watches them suspiciously.

“Let’s start with something easy. How’d you get out?”

Rea purses his lips. “Same way I got in, I guess. Went to sleep on one side, woke up on the other.”

Dean pulls out the drawing of the portal key. “You see anything like this on either side?” Rea shakes his head. “Okay. Let’s try this one then. Why’d they let you out?”

Rea looks puzzled at the question. “I didn’t want to stay.”

Dean groans. “Come on, man, you’ve got to give me more than that. It can’t be that easy.” He leans forward and jabs a finger on to the table. “My buddy is there. My best buddy. I want to know he’s safe and I want him back and I’m prepared to do pretty much anything to make that happen, and believe me, you don’t want to see what I’m capable of doing.” Rea licks his lips nervously then nods his head in small jerky movements.

“I really don’t know much,” Rea insists. “People arrive and people leave. When you’re there you just do what you did here pretty much or if you choose not to, they’ll go get someone else. I ran the café then the waitress from ‘Hobson’s’ up the road arrived and there were two cafés so I asked to come home. I’ve got things I want to do here, you know?”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Dean asks when Rea pauses, but Rea shakes his head. 

“Don’t know.” He pours himself a glass of water from the carafe on the table and takes a sip then carries on as if Dean hadn’t interrupted. “There are these creatures there too. Apparently they came from this side just like we did.” He gulps another mouthful of water then looks up at Dean. “You know, werewolves and suchlike. Mythical things, things from horror stories.” Rea looks as if he expects Dean to act surprised but Dean can’t dredge it up. He waves a hand for Rea to carry on. It seems all he had to do was get him started but Dean hasn’t heard a lot that he didn’t already know. 

“Well,” Rea says looking disappointed at Dean’s lack of reaction, “Anyway, there’s quite a lot of these monster things over there, more than there are here so they say, thank God, and sometimes a small group will arrive and hunt them.” That gets Dean’s attention but Rea talks on. He’s a lot more relaxed now and he gazes thoughtfully at his fingernails. “That’s what we’re all there for I think. To provide the supporting infrastructure for the hunters.” Rea actually chuckles. “There was this one bar - ”

“Wait,” Dean interrupts, voice low and strained. He’s got zero interest in hearing Rea’s campfire stories. “Rewind. Monsters & Hunters?” he leans forward to grab Rea’s attention.

“Yeah, the hunters are in small groups and act like they’re on vacation. You know, like on safari. For trophies. Heads on walls, werewolf-skin rugs, that sort of thing. Anything that flies makes a pretty set of wing trophies, I can tell you.” Dean must look as sick as he suddenly feels because Rea catches his eye and his cheery chattiness disappears. “Your friend is human isn’t he?” Not human enough according to Sam. Dean scrapes his chair back and it clatters to the floor behind him as he pushes to his feet. “Those monsters deserve to die,” Rea says, the first hint of real discomfort creeping into his demeanor.

“How often do these hunts happen?” 

“Every few days - I’m sorry,” Rea adds, catching on, but sorry’s not really doing it for Dean, never has. He barges his way through the tables, pushing them out of the way, fumbling for his phone as he goes. The people at the other table stop talking and watch, open-mouthed. Dean presses speed dial one and thank fuck, but Sam answers straight away.

“Yup?” Sam’s voice is distant and echoing as if it’s on speaker.

“We’ve got a problem,” Dean says, looking up and down the road before crossing at a trot between cars.

“What problem?”

“We’ve got to get Cas out of there - I think he’s been taken there as prey.”

“What are you talking about, Dean?” Sam’s impatience, along with an edge of fear, comes clearly down the phone.

“The place on the other side of the portal… ,” Dean opens the door and slides behind the wheel. He puts the phone on speaker, and starts the engine, pulling the car out deftly into the traffic, “Everything that’s not human is there to get hunted.”

“You said Cas was human.”

“And you said he wasn’t, so which is it?”

There’s a pause at the end of the phone, then, “Not.”

“Then we have to get him out of there and we have to do it now.”

***

Sam has the new portal key for Cas’s exit ready and waiting when Dean gets back to the motel room. 

“What’s going on?” Sam asks as soon as Dean pushes into the room. Dean gives him a summary of his conversation with Rea. 

“And you think - .”

“Cas isn’t human, he’s not one of the hunting groups, he doesn’t own a freaking café, so by default he’s prey.” 

Sam’s face is tight and his expression unhappy but he can’t really do anything except nod in agreement. 

“What if this doesn’t work?” Sam says. 

“Then we try again, and again, and again until it does. Okay?” 

They get out their portal keys and cant the spell in a rush but it still takes too long for Dean’s liking. When they get to the other side the motel room’s empty which isn’t especially surprising, but disappointing nonetheless.

“Café,” Dean barks, and they leave the room. Dean does a double take when there are another four motel rooms outside, standing independently just like theirs, that weren’t there before.

“Newbies?” Sam wonders.

“Hunters?” Dean suggests and Sam purses his lips pensively.

They cross the road to the café at a run and the same girl as yesterday greets them.

“Oh, hey!” she exclaims enthusiastically. “You’re back.” There’s the same noise level as yesterday and an excited buzz in the air. “Are you with that group of hunters?” she asks. 

Dean’s breath stutters in his throat. “They’re here?” he says, voice rough, snapping his head around to stare at her from where it had been roaming the room unsuccessfully for Cas. Now that he knows to look, he can see all the hunting paraphernalia scattered around the café. The odd trophy, photos and paintings hang subtly on the walls. 

“You just missed them. I think they started already out north of town. I’m sure you can catch them up.”

“We’re not hunters. Where’s Cas?” Sam asks with a sense of urgency.

“Over there,” Susan says, sounding confused, pointing to a booth over on one wall where the seats are so high the occupants are successfully hidden. Dean’s face must show his relief because her eyes widen suddenly in realization. “Oh, you thought… no, he only just got here - they wouldn’t.” She leans forward conspiratorially, “And to be honest, no-one’s worked out what he is - “

“He’s human,” Dean mutters.

Susan side-eyes him. “Whatever he is, he’s not human, but I will give you he’s a lot less monstery than the other things they hunt. The point is, if they don’t know what he is then it’s damn hard to put it him in the brochure.” The brochure? Dean raises an eyebrow, startled. Susan looks at them as if they’re stupid. “What are you even doing here?” she asks picking up a small A5 booklet from where she keeps the menus. The front cover proclaims ‘Want to hunt but can’t find anything challenging that’s still legal? Well, have we got the hunt for you’.

Sam takes it and flicks through it. “Werewolves, Kitsune, Wendigo, Ruguru, Demon… crap, Dean you should see how much they charge for this.”

“Less interested in what they charge than in getting Cas out of here before he ends up in there,” Dean says jabbing a finger at the brochure.

“Well, good luck,” Susan says. “No-one who’s not human has ever got out of here except as a trophy but I like Castiel so I do actually hope you manage it.”

“You get to know these things and you’re still okay when they get hunted?” Sam asks, looking a little put out, but Susan just looks at him, unapologetically. Maybe she’s had to justify this to others before. 

“They’re monsters. Look, the hunting for sport thing may be a little – well, disgusting, actually. But is killing werewolves such a bad thing?” 

Killing anything for sport makes Dean uncomfortable even if ultimately he agrees with the sentiment. How could he not. Ordering coffee, they walk to Cas’s booth, annoying other patrons as they go as they shove their way between tables too close together for comfort as the café tries to cram everyone in. Cas is drawing sigils and patterns on the paper tablecloth with a set of kid’s colored pencils.

“Cas. Castiel,” Dean says to get his attention. Cas snaps his head up, his brow furrows, his hand goes to his side where undoubtedly Cas’s make-shift blade is concealed.

“Do I know you?”

“Here we go again,” Sam mutters.

***

The new portal key for Cas doesn’t work and yet again Dean and Sam find themselves standing alone in the motel room.

“Fuck,” Dean says with feeling. He sits down on the end of the bed, and Sam disappears into the bathroom, his lips drawn tight together, slamming the door after him. Maybe Dean should say something, go all big brother on him, be the strong one, but he can’t. He’s too busy dealing with his own frustration to deal with Sam’s too. 

The fact is that they don’t have another option for getting Cas out, not right now at any rate and who knows how long they have before whoever is running that place works out Cas is an angel and puts him on the tour.

Dean knows Cas doesn’t feel what he feels, but despite that, at times like this when one or other of them is out there with their lives on the line, he still thinks he’s a coward for not at least saying something just in case. He bends over and hugs his knees and groans against the ache in his chest, which naturally is when Sam comes out of the bathroom re-determined. Dean gave up a long time ago hiding from Sam though so he allows himself a slow rise to meet Sam’s steady gaze with a tired, defeated one of his own.

“We need to go back,” Sam says. And, yeah. Duh. Dean’s face must reflect his thoughts because Sam scowls at him. “I mean we need to go back and tell him to stop trying to get out.”

“What?” Dean asks, standing up in a rush.

“What I mean is that we need Cas to have all his memories because we’re going to need to work together to get him out.”

“Okay. It doesn’t need both of us. I’ll go.”

Sam looks unsurprised at Dean’s eagerness but he shakes his head. “No, I’ll go.” Dean’s about to disagree but Sam interrupts. “He won’t remember you Dean and I can tell it upsets you every time, don’t try and pretend that it doesn’t. I’ll go.” Dean should probably object to the look of pity on his brother’s face but he finds he can’t. Cas not remembering him is worse than Cas not loving him back by a magnitude of a thousand so his objections die on the tip of his tongue.

“Yeah, okay,” he says dropping his eyes to the floor as his voice cracks a little. Dean hears it, he just hopes Sam doesn’t.

***

While Sam’s away, Dean decides to go visit the other two people who came back from the other side, Martin Shore and Alice Snell. Josh Rea, the café owner, was useful but only in the context that they didn’t know much at the time. Now Dean’s got a better idea of what he’s looking for and what to ask.

Martin Shore, a middle-aged man with prematurely silver hair that Dean can barely see as he peeks out from the frigging bars that have been put recently into his windows won’t talk to him at all. Dean walks around the house and it’s covered in wards and traps and charms, barricaded by silver and salt talismans.

He knocks heavily on the door. “I know about the other place you went to,” he yells, hoping that a sense of brothers-in-arms will help. It doesn’t. The guy yells at him to go away and it’s a neighbor, young and cross-looking, in her pajamas by the looks of it, that eventually comes out, fed up with the noise perhaps, and suspiciously eyes Dean and keeping her distance, tells him the guy went mad after disappearing for two months. Conspiratorially, she tells Dean she thinks he must have been away in a hospital and she’s thinking of ringing them to come take him back.

Dean nods pleasantly and calls it a bust. He’s not sure he can find it in him to criticize Martin Shore if he’s honest, given what he’s seen. 

Alice Snell is the second person he goes to visit and the experience couldn’t be more different. When she finds out he’s been through the portal she practically drags him into her home saying gleefully, “Well, we’re not supposed to talk about it but… “

He’s there for two hours but rather than being enlightened, by the time he leaves he’s depressed, rubbing his hand through his hair with lethargic movements. He stares vacantly out at the road as he lingers on the porch of Alice’s home. More and more it’s looking as if there’s nothing they can do. Oh, Alice had plenty of tales, and definitely seemed to have enjoyed herself mostly from what Dean can tell, but she had only horror stories to tell of the fate of monsters. They died by the hunt, and if they were lucky enough to escape one hunt, another would surely come along within a few days. By Alice’s estimate, none of the monsters there had been there longer than a month and that was the lucky ones. 

Cas has been there a week now. Dean thinks Cas has a lot of things going for him that give him a chance of surviving a hunt. He’s an excellent soldier and it’s not as if he’s not practiced in hiding from people, angels, demons and every other type of living creature out to get him, but Dean knows Cas is vulnerable these days. Whether he could survive a hunt in his almost-human state is another question. Dean closes his eyes, blinks a few times to clear them. Cas isn’t dead yet, isn’t even on the shopping list. They’ve time.

Yeah, Dean can convince himself of that if he really tries.

***

After a night where Dean gets no sleep whatsoever, and Cas has had long enough to come back to himself after the last failed exit attempt, Dean and Sam head back through the portal. The idea is to keep plugging away, the three of them, to work out Cas’s exit strategy. After this trip, they only have enough of the spell’s ingredients for one more return journey, so this time they’re staying until they come up with something. There’s nothing more they can do back in the real world anyway. They’ve exhausted all their sources and just don’t have anywhere else to go.

When they step outside the room, the extra motel rooms are still there and as Dean watches them he feels his pulse thumping in his temple as his anger builds. His hands curl into fists at his side and he wants to thump something. He’s aware of the irony of the situation but he can’t help it – he’s even starting to feel some sympathy for the monsters being hunted in this sick setup.

“Let’s go,” he growls, and he and Sam head towards the café. Cas isn’t there but it doesn’t take much to find him. Susan points them towards the edge of the town and when they get there they find a huge pond occupied by a meager two ducks.

“Do you think… “ Sam starts, then pauses. Dean squints at the ducks. Sam starts up again, “Do you think they came through the portal?” he hisses.

“I wonder what a duck portal key looks like?”

“It looks like this,” says a recognizably deep voice from behind them. They both whirl around simultaneously to face Cas, who’s holding a rough sketch of a duck, with a portal key in one corner.

“Didn’t know you were an artist,” Dean says for want of anything else to say. He watches Cas, stares at his face without any sense of embarrassment and tries to tell if he’s got all his marbles.

“You never asked,” Cas murmurs. Then he looks at them both, one to the other, and smiles a small, familiar smile. “It’s good to see you both.”

Dean huffs a sigh of immense relief. “You remember.”

Cas nods in Sam’s direction. “Thanks to Sam, yes.” He shuffles his feet a little. “It’s good to see you both.”

Dean steps forward and pulls him into a hug. “You too, man. You too.” It’s like the Cas of the last few days has been some shell of who Cas really is now, relying on instinct and forgetting who he’s become. Not that Dean blames him, that soldier part of Cas is never going to go away and it’s going to keep him alive, but he likes this Cas a lot better. Dean realizes he’s probably been holding on too long when Sam clears his throat, and reluctantly Dean lets go.

“So… memories… that’s fantastic,” Dean says, slightly self-conscious. “Now, how do we get you out?” Cas tilts his head. He looks so sad that Dean’s already braced for what’s coming. 

“You don’t,” Cas says. He looks at Sam. “Sam knows.”

The rises of Sam’s cheeks blush red as Dean turns to look at him, the accusation already clear in Dean’s body language, before he even speaks.

“You know?” Dean says, slowly. He’s not going to lose it just yet he tells himself. “You know what Sammy?”

Sam shuffles his feet, looking at Cas as he speaks as if seeking approval. “The only way out is with a human portal key, and the human portal keys only work on humans.” Cas nods at Sam as he talks, confirming what Sam’s telling him.

Dean kicks a pebble hard into the pond. It splashes near the ducks and startles them into raucous quacking and wing-beating. They fly off to the other side of the pond. “And you were going to tell me this when exactly?”

“Dean,” Sam says quietly, “you knew. Or at least suspected.”

“There must be something,” Dean says, angrily but he’s angry at himself really because yes, he did know, but he’d assumed they’d find a way around it.

“They might not want to hunt me,” Cas says. Dean can tell he’s trying to make him feel better but it’s really not working. 

“Why the hell wouldn’t they? You’re an angel for frick’s sake.”

Cas looks away, peering at the ducks with a stare as intense as that he normally reserves for Dean. “Barely, and in name only on some days.” 

Dean steps forward and puts a hand on Cas’s shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Sam look away. 

“Cas,” he says, dropping his head, and the volume of his voice, and catching Cas’s eye, drawing him back to look at him. “I’m so sorry. You should have gone back to Heaven. Back to the angels. You can be an angel again. Can you still go back? From here?”

Cas shakes his head. “Dean I made the right choice. I… “ he pauses, hesitates.

“What?” Dean prompts.

“It’s nothing. But know that I made the choice to stay with you and Sam. I stayed for me, for purely selfish reasons. There’s nothing to blame yourself for.”

But of course it is Dean’s fault, all of it, right back from when he made Cas rebel against Heaven, right back since then, who and what Cas is now, what he’s been through, where he is right now, the fact that he’s going to be hunted and killed, it’s all Dean’s fault.

“Dean,” Cas says sharply. “Don’t.”

Dean looks at him then, really looks, at the fear in Cas’s face. Of course he’d be afraid. Who wouldn’t be, and here’s Dean being a selfish dick when Cas is scared stiff about being hunted and slaughtered.

“Yeah. Sorry, man. Look, we’re going to stay and help you ward off the hunters, okay. Ain’t that right Sam?”

Sam turns around to face them. “Yep, sure is,” he says with awkwardly false optimism. Dean could swear Sam told him he did acting at school once. He must have been crap at it.

“And we’re going to find a way to get you out, however long it takes. Right Sam?”

“Yeah. Sure,” Sam says quietly, looking up at Cas and meeting his eye. Cas smiles, but it’s not a happy smile.

***

The next morning Dean is a lot more relaxed because when they make their way to the café first thing in the morning after spending the night sharing Cas’s motel room, the first thing they notice is that the extra motel rooms aren’t there anymore which means the hunters have gone. There’s a bounce in Dean’s step as he crosses the road between Sam on one side and Cas on the other, just as it should be. The hunters being gone means Cas isn’t in danger, at least today, and it buys them some time to work out how to get Cas out of this place.

The bounce disappears pretty damn fast though when they walk into the café and get greeted by a subdued Susan. Her eyes flick nervously across to Cas in a way Dean doesn’t like at all. Dean glances down and sees the back of the latest advertising brochure held in Susan’s hands, Susan hugging it to her chest like she never wants to let it go.

“He’s an angel? Really?” she says leaning towards Dean conspiratorially, barely audible in the usual clamor of the café. “Notwithstanding he’s not exactly what I expected an angel to be like, it seems kind of wrong to hunt angels, don’t you think?”

Not surprisingly Dean agrees with her whole-heartedly. He licks his lips against their sudden dryness and wiggles his fingers, and Susan reluctantly hands the brochure over. There on the front page in large white letters are the words, ‘Hunt an Angel!’ along with a caricature of an angel, big white wings and all. 

“Cas doesn’t even have his wings anymore,” Dean snorts in disgust, screwing the brochure up in one fist. “If some hunter thinks he’s going to have angel wing trophies up on the wall in his den he’s going to be sorely disappointed.”

“And my wings weren’t white,” Cas points out, way too calm for Dean’s liking.

“Yeah?” Susan asks, eyes opening wide. “What color were they?”

“Black,” Cas murmurs, his gaze far away like he can see them in his imagination.

“Which is all not really the point,” Sam says. He looks sideways at Cas, then back to the waitress. “When’s the next group of hunters due?”

She shuffles uncomfortably. “We never know. Tomorrow, today, next week.” 

“Then is there anywhere Cas can hide out until we work out how to get him out of here?” Sam asks. He waves an arm around the café expansively. “Like here. It’s hardly sport if they shoot him while he’s drinking coffee.”

Susan shakes her head. “The hunt happens outside the town. They’ll come and round everything up in the morning and take them to the hunting ground. There’s nowhere to hide that they won’t find him. Don’t you think others haven’t tried?”

“We can’t just sit here and let them kill him,” Dean says. He throws the screwed-up brochure forcefully across the café and a few heads turn to look curiously. “He’s got hardly any angel juice left, no wings. It’ll be a massacre. He won’t stand a chance.”

“I believe I would be able to hold my own Dean,” Cas replies snippily. “I’m not completely useless.”

Sam rubs a hand through his hair, and interjects before Dean can make a come back. “Well, let’s have breakfast and see what we can come up with. The hunters aren’t here yet.”

They settle at a booth, and order food but none of them eat much. It feels too much like the condemned man’s last meal. They toss ideas around but nothing sticks. They get through a lot of coffee and take it in turns to stretch their legs and clear their heads outside. One time Dean comes back and Sam and Cas are sitting not saying anything, Sam staring off into space and Cas writing something on a piece of paper that when Dean comes back, he folds with careful, precise movements, writing side in, blank side out, pushing the crease into the paper with his thumbnail. 

“Any brilliant ideas while I was gone?” Dean asks, knowing already what the answer will be.

Sam looks at him woefully and Cas just folds the paper again so it’s a square no more than a couple of inches along each side. He puts it under his palm and lays his other palm over the top of his other hand. 

“I hear some things survive the hunt,” Cas says. His face is hard and emotionless, too much like Cas of old. Dean doesn’t know how he does it. Dean wants to scream and shout. 

“Not forever.”

“No.”

“We’ll be there with you, Cas. You won’t be on your own,” Sam says.

“Yes, I will,” Cas says. 

***

The next day Cas isn’t in the motel room when they wake up and when they rush out of the door, barely dressed, the extra motel rooms are back. Dean and Sam hurry towards the café and Susan’s face tells them everything they need to know.

“Where did they take him?” Dean demands, the blood pumping in his ears so hard and fast in his panic he’s not sure he’ll hear what she says when she answers.

“Outside the city. North. You can’t get out though, not on your own.”

“Watch us,” Sam says, as Dean and he turn on their heels and dash out of the café.

“Wait… “ Susan calls behind them, but they’re already on their way and they don’t look back.

They run randomly north, towards the city’s strange imprecise boundaries looking for the hunting grounds but they can’t find anything that indicates there’s anything at all beyond the city’s edge, let alone find the hunt.

Dean lashes out at a sad looking tree in frustration. He didn’t even say goodbye to Cas yesterday, let alone tell him how he feels, but of course if he had, it would only have been for Dean’s benefit not Cas’s. But then Cas isn’t coming back, he’s going to die, so it doesn’t matter if it’s for Dean’s benefit not Cas’s.

“Cas, I love you,” Dean whispers into the void beyond the strange shimmer that’s the city boundary but it doesn’t make Dean feel any better.

“Dean.” Sam grabs his elbow and Dean turns on him. 

“What? What, Sam? Cas isn’t coming back. What does it matter?” Dean shakes Sam’s arm off and throws a punch into the invisible barrier that keeps them in the city. The barrier bends around his fist in a highly unsatisfying manner.

“Dean, he’s a soldier and he’s resourceful.”

“He’s human, Sam,” Dean spits. “He’s got no weapons except that make-shift blade he’s been carrying around. “I don’t give a fuck how resourceful he is, he’s not going to survive up against experienced hunters with an arsenal.”

“He’s not entirely human. He could have something left, some mojo that’ll help him.”

“If he had something you don’t think he’d have mentioned it? The only angelic quality he has left is a lack of emotional intelligence and I don’t think that’s going to save him from a bullet, do you?”

Sam steps back. “Don’t be a dick, Dean. I care too, you know.”

Yeah, of course he does. Sam’s simple statement takes the wind out of Dean’s sails and he flops onto the grass. Water in his eyes threatens to turn into tears and spill down his cheeks. It’s the unfairness of it all that makes it seem worse than any of the other times Cas might have died. It’s not as if Cas’s, or Sam’s, death isn’t a regular possibility that Dean has to deal with and live with on a daily basis. He takes in a huge gulp of air, and focuses on Sam’s shadow elongated beside him in the weird light they get this side of the portal.

He stands up. “If he makes it, he’ll go back to the café, so we go there and we wait.” He strides away before Sam can reply and Sam shuffles after him after a moment, not trying to catch up.

It turns out there is something waiting for them at the café, but it’s not Cas.

Susan has something for them - Cas’s folded paper from the day before. 

“He said to give you this. I tried to give it to you before but you were so fast.” She holds it vaguely in their direction. Sam goes to take it but she pushes it towards Dean instead. “He said it was for Dean.”

Dean takes the paper square, trying not to think about what it might be, as they head towards an empty table. Breakfast serving is in full swing and the café is getting even fuller if that’s possible, although some people are leaving as others arrive. Maybe they have a rota. It seems way too coordinated. 

Susan brings them coffee and a menu, and looks genuinely apologetic “Sorry guys. This time of day when there’s a hunt you gotta eat to hold the table.”

Sam orders two breakfast burgers without even looking at the menu and Susan goes away. Dean twirls the folded paper between his fingers, one way then back the other.

“Are you going to open it?” Sam asks, nodding at the paper in Dean’s hands.

Dean doesn’t know. Aren’t you only supposed to get these last will and testament type notes when someone’s confirmed dead? Cas isn’t confirmed dead yet and Dean still can’t believe he might be. Opening the note is tantamount to accepting that Cas has gone and Dean’s not there yet. He puts the paper down on the table, unopened.

“Dean,” Sam sighs exasperated. “It might be important.”

It probably is important, or Cas wouldn’t have left it for him, but if it was about getting Cas out then he’d have given it to Dean directly. If it’s anything else then it’ll be just as important tomorrow or next year.

An older man in a flat cap sitting at the next table leans over and interrupts Sam just as Dean’s sure Sam’s about to spout about how Dean always ignores his problems and just hopes they disappear.

“Can you pass me the pepper please, young man.”

Dean looks at the table with its pepper but no salt, and its silverware with no silver. He almost laughs because on one hand the residents of the town support the hunt, but on the other they’re monster friendly. His strangled morbid humor comes out as a snort and Sam checks him as he hands the pepper to the guy behind him. Who already has pepper on his table. Oh, well, what the hell, who is Dean to say how much pepper a guy needs on his salad.

Sam turns back and thankfully his urge to preach at Dean has been sidetracked. Dean pushes the paper across the table.

“You open it.”

“It was for you.”

“I’m not going to open it for about a month, give or take. Maybe a year. Your call.”

Sam tentatively picks up the paper. “You sure?”

“Sam,” Dean warns.

Sam opens the paper tentatively as if it might explode. Dean wishes he didn’t have to stay and watch. He supposes he doesn’t actually have to stay but he’s kind of rooted to his seat right now. Sam opens the paper all the way, reads for about one second flat then slams it, writing down, on to the table.

“Oh, no way am I reading that.” Sam pushes the paper towards Dean. Dean frowns at the paper held in place under two of Sam’s fingers, then up at Sam. “Sorry.” Sam’s looks distraught and Dean looks back down at the paper. Slowly, he pulls it out from underneath Sam’s fingers. The paper’s open now and as a result the draw to read it is so much stronger. He turns it over but doesn’t look at it. Cas’s tiny scrawl is out of focus on the page as Dean deliberately sets his focus at a different distance even though he’s staring right at the paper.

He lifts it up, but flicks his gaze sideways over Sam’s shoulder before he gets a chance to read any words. The heavy stare of the older man in the flat cap is a tangible thing.

“Do you mind?” Dean asks. The man smiles as if he knows something Dean doesn’t, and looks away. Dean turns back to the paper and reads. It’s short. Cas is a man of few words.

‘Dean. I thought you should know that I love you. I am in love with you, I believe the phrase is. I’ve only come to realize recently that this is why I made the choices I made. I know that you could never reciprocate, and so I chose not to tell you. I’m not sure why I’m telling you now except that it’s important to me that you know that you were loved.”

Dean folds the paper in half. He knew he should never have read the note. How sickly ironic. Tears well again in his eyes and he rubs his sleeve across his face to wipe them away. 

“Dean I’m sorry,” Sam says laying a hand on his forearm.

“How much did you read?” Dean asks, his voice a hollow croak as he tries to hold back tears.

“Enough,” Sam says. Dean looks at his brother. He feels sick, physically sick. Cas’s note is like a punch in the gut. Dean should have told him you don’t do stuff like that. It’s not frigging fair!

Flat cap man stands up and leans over Sam. It’s all Dean can do not to hit him. Can’t the guy see there’s something private going on here?

“Can I see that?” Flat cap man points to the piece of paper and Dean drags it back away out of reach in horror.

Sam stands up, at least a foot taller than flat cap man, and he looks fucking intimidating. “It’s personal.”

“It might be to your considerable advantage to let me see it,” flat cap man replies softly, and not unkindly. “The angel wrote it, yes?”

“He’s human,” Sam says doggedly, and Dean snaps his head up.

“Yes, I think he might be,” the man says and reaches out again for the folded paper. “Please?”

Dean’s not sure why he gives the paper up but something in the man’s demeanor gives him - what? Hope?

“I guess I made the wrong call,” the man says, eyes skimming over the note. “I guess Castiel is human after all.” The man looks up from the note and hands it back to Dean. “Love is a very human emotion, don’t you think?” he says with another smile, then in a blink, he’s gone.

Dean looks around, then turns to look wide-eyed at Sam, with an optimism that scares the crap out of him, because what if he’s wrong. 

“Do you think… ” he starts, but doesn’t finish because he’s distracted by a commotion over by the entrance to the café. There’s a hum in the air, like a wave of noise as everyone turns that way and starts up murmuring in pleased surprise. Susan is hugging someone. Dean stands up slowly, side-by-side with Sam, and when the person Susan is hugging turns out to be Cas he literally yelps with excitement. It’d be embarrassing under any other circumstances. 

Dean and Sam fall into step and almost run to the door. Susan steps back, a huge smile stretching her face as Dean steps in and hugs Cas, squeezing him tight as Cas hugs back. Dean lets go and watches, beaming, as Sam does the same. 

Cas looks tired, his hair in disarray and his face scratched. The grey t-shirt he’s wearing has a tear on one shoulder and a raw-looking graze on the skin is showing underneath, but that looks like the extent of the damage. Cas is alive. The words tumble through Dean’s head on an infinite loop. And he loves Dean. Dean’s brain tries that for size too. Cas is alive and he’s in love with Dean.

“I’m led to understand I’ll be able to leave now, if I want,” Cas says, “and I really want,” he adds with feeling.

Dean grins wider, and Sam, grinning too, roots in his pocket for the exit portal key. The first one he pulls out is the one that Sam drew that matches the key they found in Cas’s motel room and he hands it over happily but Cas shakes his head with a tired smile. 

“Not that one,” Cas says. “The human one.”

Saying their goodbyes and thank yous to Susan, they head towards the motel room. Despite the fact that Dean has every expectation that this time all three of them will make it back in one piece, he’s still nervous as hell and he keeps Cas close while they recite the spell, as if he can drag him through the portal with sheer willpower alone.

Either the spell works or Dean’s willpower works, and they all three make it through, and the relief in the room is palpable. Cas turns to Dean, and Dean turns to Cas and they stare at each other from mere inches away.

“Um, I gotta go get… go do… something,” Sam stutters and Dean snickers at his discomfort for which he gets a parting middle finger as Sam slams the door shut.

“Did you read the note?” Cas asks, looking down at the floor in obvious embarrassment. Dean nods. 

“Yeah.”

“I want you to forget about what I wrote. I don’t want to make our relationship uncomfortable.”

Dean steps forward. He’s almost chest to chest with Cas now and Cas looks up sharply and takes a hesitant step back. 

“I can’t do that Cas,” Dean says, taking a step forward into Cas’s space again. Cas looks confused but he doesn’t move this time.

“Dean, what are you doing?”

“Cas, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.” Dean leans in and presses his lips to Cas’s. “Me too,” he murmurs against Cas’s mouth, “Me too.”


End file.
